In this article, I explore some challenges and strategies for anthropologist expert witnesses working on cases where home-country governments depict an overall more positive situation than what the applicants claim. Drawing upon an anonymized Honduran asylum case, I discuss the utility of state theory for debunking fallacious home-government sources that downplay dangerous situations while exaggerating state achievements, suggesting ways to illuminate the inherent political motivations of government reports. Honduran asylum applicants flee from gang violence, political violence, and gendered violence, now more than a decade after the June 2009 military coup that ruptured already fragile public institutions. While official Honduran government reports claim that the state is alleviating such problems by creating new programs and laws, ethnographic evidence from anthropologists working with anticoup social movements suggests that the state's security apparatus often exacerbates violence, and that the mere act of passing legislation does little in practice to protect vulnerable Hondurans.

中文翻译：

---

洪都拉斯现实的竞争版本：国家理论作为人类学家专家证人的工具

在本文中，我探讨了人类学家专家证人在处理母国政府描述的总体情况比申请人声称的更积极的情况下面临的一些挑战和策略。借鉴一个匿名的洪都拉斯庇护案，我讨论了国家理论在揭穿错误的国内政府消息来源的效用，这些消息来源淡化危险情况，同时夸大国家成就，提出了阐明政府报告内在政治动机的方法。洪都拉斯的庇护申请人逃离帮派暴力、政治暴力和性别暴力，距 2009 年 6 月军事政变破坏本已脆弱的公共机构已有十多年。虽然洪都拉斯政府的官方报告声称该州正在通过制定新的计划和法律来缓解此类问题，